A thrilling crime story, captivatingly dramatic and psychologically astute.
In DePrima’s thriller, a reporter investigates the attempted murder of her police officer fiance and follows an increasingly lurid trail of evidence.
J.T. Kennard (she generally answers to Jess) is content to live quietly; she’s a reporter in Kentucky who largely covers “all things equine,” often in the world of horse racing. Her placid existence is shattered by tragedy when her fiance, Joe Schuler, a Louisville Metro cop, is found gravely injured, apparently the result of a car accident during a terrible snowstorm. His skull is fractured, and he’s put on life support, with his prospects for recovery far from clear. After Jess speaks to Lieutenant Alex Washburn, Joe’s immediate supervisor, she concludes he wasn’t in an accident at all; he was a superb driver, and his worst injuries seem to have been inflicted after the crash—she surmises that he was forced off the road and then brutally beaten. Jess conducts an investigation of her own, one as journalistically painstaking as it is relentless. She is a memorable hero, strikingly drawn by the author. In a heated conversation with Joe’s doctor, she rebukes his suggestion that he may have been overly optimistic about Joe’s condition: “You think you’ve given us false hope. I don’t give a flying fuck about your emotional health. What are you going to do about Joe?” Eventually, another body is discovered in the same pond as Joe’s truck. The dead girl is Samantha Catlett, a college classmate of Joe’s son, Josh, and a girl who was unabashed about her crush on Joe. This discovery raises uncomfortable questions about why she was with Joe, and Jess aims not only to find those who attacked him but also to protect his reputation. This is a complex tale, but the author never permits it to descend into convoluted tail-chasing, even as Joe’s assault is revealed to be part of a larger, gruesomely dark conspiracy. The book is the best kind of hard-boiled crime drama—intelligently conceived, powerfully executed, and, for all its unpredictability, chillingly plausible.
A thrilling crime story, captivatingly dramatic and psychologically astute.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9798987508824
Page Count: 300
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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